Locating Innocence in Sexual Difference: Problematized Masculinity in Hemingway and Baldwin
Rachid Toumi | Ibn Zohr University
Publication: Volume 5 Issue 3
Abstract | This paper examines the theme of gender in Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. Both expatriate artists interrogate in their novels an American gendered identity tied to innocence and trauma in historical junctures. For these influential members of the New/Lost Generation, sexuality is less a biological fact than a social construction and a performativity. In their counter-narratives, both iconoclastic American writers dramatize traumatized and problematized masculinity which clings to a false sense of security. They depict the male protagonists as troubled patriarchal subjectivity-formations struggling to rehabilitate the innocence and happiness of an Eden-like social space against the “sea change” of history and the dazzling light of personal experience. As transatlantic modernist icons whose literary sensibility is framed by the experience of the Great War and its aftermath, Hemingway and Baldwin are witnesses to a historical era characterized by a social order in flux in which hegemonic patriarchy is in crisis against the backdrop of emerging new identities. In exilic space, they put under review the standards defining gendered identity by positing the loss of innocence connected to sexuality and the embrace of sexual difference as a condition for endurance and the maintenance of a civilized and sustainable democratic social arrangement.
Key words | Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, Sexuality, Patriarchy, Masculinity, Innocence, Gender Fluidity, Identity, Subjectivity
Rachid Toumi (hemingwayagadir@gmail.com) is a PhD candidate at the Laboratory of Values, Society and Development at the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, Université Ibn Zohr, Morocco. His doctoral thesis is on the theme of Identity and expatriation in the works of the American authors, Ernest Hemingway and James Baldwin. He completed an MA program in English titled “Race, Ethnicity and Alterity in Literature and Culture” in 2007 at the same faculty. Rachid currently teaches English at the Ministry of Education in Morocco.
MLA Citation for this Article:
Toumi, Rachid. “Locating Innocence in Sexual Difference: Problematized Masculinity in Hemingway and Baldwin.” Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies, vol. 5, no. 3, 20 May 2023, pp. 25–41, https://ellids.com/archives/2023/05/5.3-Toumi.pdf.